1 Oct
2001
1 Oct
'01
6:40 p.m.
On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 01:00:45AM -0400, Glen Goodwin wrote:
Tony Duell wrote:
Of course that makes much more sense. Someone (I think Iggy) pointed out
that that's exactly what modern BIOSes do.
I wonder if any code tries to call INT 18h after the system was running?
(I hope that's not the way BASICA works.) If you did, a message saying "No
ROM BASIC" would be much clearer than one saying "No bootable device".
But
I'm sure most of the time INT 18h got called at boot time, so I would still
vote for a "No bootable device" message.
-- Derek
Since they never did provide BASIC they had to
make INT 18 do something
(remember an application program could, in theory, call that interrupt).
Since that interrupt should have entered ROM BASIC, the most sensible
thing to do was to print that there was no ROM BASIC and then halt the
CPU.
Since "they never did provide BASIC" then there was *always* "no ROM
BASIC." That's like stopping the machine with a message stating "no
printer." Why not display something understandable to a common user, such
as "no bootable device?"